We want to respond to those of you who’ve commented about your problems using cashback last Friday. For a few hours on Friday, November 28, Live Search cashback experienced an unexpected outage. If you completed a purchase that day, you can follow up on a cashback rebate by contacting Microsoft at https://support.search.live.com/. Be sure to have the order number and the email address provided for the transaction.

Here are the details about Friday’s outage:

• A significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down for several hours on Friday.
• The downtime was partly related to investigating the issue and partly to rebuilding and redeploying the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search cashback.
• The issues that caused Friday’s problem have been resolved. We’re confident we won’t have further problems.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Rajat Taneja, General Manager, Worldwide Commercial Search